The Geography of Smoking

One in five Americans continue to smoke cigarettes, according to a new survey
by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The smoking rate
varies from low of 9.2 percent in Utah to a high of 26.6 percent in
West Virginia. The map below, from the Wall Street Journal, shows the smoking rate by state.

The data are interesting and they allow us to look at the extent to
which smoking is associated with all sorts of things, from more obvious
ones like cancer and heart disease to the economic and demographic
characteristics of states with higher or lower levels of smoking and
even the relationship between smoking and happiness. With a helpful
analytical assist from my colleague Charlotta Mellander, we decided to
take a quick look. We ran some simple correlations and scatter-plots
between state smoking rates and these factors. As usual, we point out
that correlation does not imply causality, but simply points to
associations between variables. Still, a number of interesting things
stand out.

It will come as little surprise that states with higher levels of
smoking have significantly higher rates of death from cancer, heart
disease, and cerebrovascular diseases like hypertension. There is a
significant correlation between state smoking rates and death rates
from cancer (.75), heart disease (.7), and cerebrovascular disease
(.6).

It
might be, however, that states with greater percentages of smokers are
those where people pay less attention to their health generally or are
more likely to engage in risky behavior. Consider the relationship
between state smoking rates and their levels of obesity, where we find
significant association both for obesity among adults (.7) and
children (.6).

Might
smoking be related to states' broader social and psychological
climates? To get at this, we looked at the relationship between smoking
and a commonly used measure of subjective well-being or happiness
developed by the Gallup Organization. Smoking is negatively associated
with state happiness (with a correlation of -.7). Since these
correlations only reflect associations between variables and not
causality, it's hard to say whether this reflects the fact that happier
people smoke less or unhappier ones smoke more, or that both smoking
and happiness levels reflect something else. To get at this, we look at
the associations between state smoking levels and social and
demographic factors below.

Common sense would suggest that more affluent people would smoke
less and poorer ones would smoke more, but that's not what the data
indicate - at least when comparing states. State smoking levels are not
related to state income levels or to Gross State Product per capita;
the correlations for both are not statistically significant.

One would think that more highly educated people smoke less. And
that is borne out by our analysis. Smoking is highly associated
with education levels, measured as the percentage of adults with a
college degree (with a negative correlation of -.8).

To what extent does smoking reflect the kind of work people do? We
examine the relationships between smoking levels and three classes of
jobs - creative/professional/ knowledge jobs, blue-collar working class
jobs, and standardized service class jobs like those in food processing
and home health care. The strongest association is with working class
jobs, with a correlation of .5: Smoking is higher in states with a
greater concentration of these blue-collar jobs. Smoking is also
associated with service class jobs. But here the correlation is
negative (-.6). Smoking does not appear to be associated with
knowledge-professional-creative jobs, the correlation here is not
statistically significant.

That said, smoking rate is associated with concentrations of
artists, musicians, and entertainers. Contrary to the stereotypical
image of cigarette-puffing bohemians or hipsters, smoking is less
prevalent in states with more of these artistic types: The correlation
is negative (-.5).

Lastly, smoking is negatively correlated with larger concentrations
of gays and lesbians, as well as immigrants (both with correlations of
roughly -.45). This likely reflects broader structural characteristics
of those states, as more highly educated states also tend to be more
tolerant and open to diversity.

Richard Florida is Co-founder and Editor at Large of CityLab.com and Senior Editor at The Atlantic. He isdirector of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and Global Research Professor at NYU.
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